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Interesting to me is Lenovo's decision to include cooling fans on the RAM. If you read the enthusiast forums, it's something that most everyone makes fun of, b

Interesting to me is Lenovo's decision to include cooling fans on the RAM. If you read the enthusiast forums, it's something that most everyone makes fun of, but something I've always wondered about myself. My Threadripper build initially had pretty hot memory, because there was no way to get airflow to the "back" half (Lenovo arranges the memory horizontally, but they're vertical on my board). Eventually I improved temps by mounting my GPU "upright" (i.e. attached a a riser with the PCI-E fingers facing down), and this gave the bottom intake fans some way to get cold air over the RAM in the back. But, what I've learned from this is that when an OEM works closely with AMD, they actively cool the RAM. Very interesting.

tedunangst 6y ago
Is the thinkstation rated for high(ish) temp operation?
ChuckNorris89 6y ago
>Interesting to me is Lenovo's decision to include cooling fans on the RAM. IIRC, these workstations are made for VFX houses where they'll probably render scenes nearly 24/7, weekends included, so Lenovo didn't fuck around with the cooling for such a demanding use case. If you're on a crunch to finish that epic 30 second shot worth six-figures for that upcoming Hollywood blockbuster then you want the best pro-grade tools you can get that you can leave running for days and sleep soundly knowing they'll do their job and not hang up or throttle. Any major downtime in this racket is worth more than that workstation. >If you read the enthusiast forums, it's something that most everyone makes fun of True, because most "enthusiasts" on forums are just well-off gamers or posers showing off their expensive setups for upvotes, that are just used 2-6 hours a day for video games and scrolling through reddit instead of 24/7 workloads responsible for a business's revenue stream.
- willis936 6y ago
  The VRMs are more important. They have a real chance of thermal runaway, consistently are the hottest component in any system, and are one of the most common elements to fail. As far as I can tell from the images, the P620 VRMs are given a generous heatsink with good airflow. Active cooling on the RAM? Sure, why not? It won’t hurt. It won’t really help either, assuming the case has acceptable airflow.
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  > these workstations are made for VFX houses where they'll probably render scenes nearly 24/7, weekends included They render VFX on employee workstations? Why don't they render in a data centre with proper cooling and things? Must make the offices very hot!
  - StillBored 6y ago
    Well at least in the past they did. For example: https://www.wsj.com/video/lucasfilm-data-center-and-the-real-death-star/FAFAA92B-815A-45A2-ACA5-39336EEF8300.html https://www.wsj.com/video/lucasfilm-data-center-and-the-real...
  - mywittyname 6y ago
    Not a VFX worker, but I did CAD simulations for a while (which uses very similar equipment, Xeons, Quadros, 128+GB ram) and we would definitely run tasks like test suites over the weekend on our personal workstations because there was no guarantee that the cluster we used for testing would ever actually run your workloads. This was especially true when releases were close.
  - ChuckNorris89 6y ago
    You use clusters to render a whole/movie scene when it's finished or in various stages of completion to show to the art directors but you still need powerful workstations to preview your own changes to the scene as you work on it. Plus, clusters aren't always at your disposal and usually have schedules when you can book them according to priority and not all workflow can be automated and pipelined to fit a cluster. VFX work is not just 3D modelling where you click Render and boom, 2 days later, your scene it's ready to be put on film. There's tons of tasks you need to do pre- and post- production like layout, rigging, motion capture, rotoscoping, comping, etc. and most of these tasks are done manually on the artist's workstation. I'm sure big houses like ILM, Pixar, Weta, Disney have the money and technical chops to engineer and maintain their own in-house rendering cluster infrastructure but small firms don't and rely on beefy workstations like this to render their project over multiple days.
  - rainonmoon 6y ago
    I'm not an expert but I do work at a VFX house: GP's assertion about people working in Hollywood rendering on their workstations 24/7 seems unlikely and your data centre vision is more accurate in my experience, where shots are rendered out via dedicated render servers. The ultra-contemporary move is actually to build your pipeline in the cloud.[0] But on-prem, you still need a lot of power in the box when you're working in the scene, and if you just want to bounce out a preview of something small without waiting on the render queue, having that power gives you flexibility. So you're both almost right? EDIT: Oops, leave a tab open for a few hours and come back to find your reply's been scooped. I'll leave this up and add some more links for anyone curious about cloud rendering though[1][2], it's an interesting space. [0] https://press.aboutamazon.com/news-releases/news-release-details/weta-digital-advances-visual-effects-and-animation-cloud-aws https://press.aboutamazon.com/news-releases/news-release-det... [1] https://utopiancorps.com/cloud-rendering/ https://utopiancorps.com/cloud-rendering/ [2] https://www.awsthinkbox.com/studio-in-the-cloud/cloud-rendering https://www.awsthinkbox.com/studio-in-the-cloud/cloud-render...

tedunangst 6y ago

Is the thinkstation rated for high(ish) temp operation?

ChuckNorris89 6y ago

>Interesting to me is Lenovo's decision to include cooling fans on the RAM. IIRC, these workstations are made for VFX houses where they'll probably render scenes nearly 24/7, weekends included, so Lenovo didn't fuck around with the cooling for such a demanding use case. If you're on a crunch to finish that epic 30 second shot worth six-figures for that upcoming Hollywood blockbuster then you want the best pro-grade tools you can get that you can leave running for days and sleep soundly knowing they'll do their job and not hang up or throttle. Any major downtime in this racket is worth more than that workstation. >If you read the enthusiast forums, it's something that most everyone makes fun of True, because most "enthusiasts" on forums are just well-off gamers or posers showing off their expensive setups for upvotes, that are just used 2-6 hours a day for video games and scrolling through reddit instead of 24/7 workloads responsible for a business's revenue stream.

willis936 6y ago
The VRMs are more important. They have a real chance of thermal runaway, consistently are the hottest component in any system, and are one of the most common elements to fail. As far as I can tell from the images, the P620 VRMs are given a generous heatsink with good airflow. Active cooling on the RAM? Sure, why not? It won’t hurt. It won’t really help either, assuming the case has acceptable airflow.
chrisseaton 6y ago
> these workstations are made for VFX houses where they'll probably render scenes nearly 24/7, weekends included They render VFX on employee workstations? Why don't they render in a data centre with proper cooling and things? Must make the offices very hot!
- StillBored 6y ago
  Well at least in the past they did. For example: https://www.wsj.com/video/lucasfilm-data-center-and-the-real-death-star/FAFAA92B-815A-45A2-ACA5-39336EEF8300.html https://www.wsj.com/video/lucasfilm-data-center-and-the-real...
- mywittyname 6y ago
  Not a VFX worker, but I did CAD simulations for a while (which uses very similar equipment, Xeons, Quadros, 128+GB ram) and we would definitely run tasks like test suites over the weekend on our personal workstations because there was no guarantee that the cluster we used for testing would ever actually run your workloads. This was especially true when releases were close.
- ChuckNorris89 6y ago
  You use clusters to render a whole/movie scene when it's finished or in various stages of completion to show to the art directors but you still need powerful workstations to preview your own changes to the scene as you work on it. Plus, clusters aren't always at your disposal and usually have schedules when you can book them according to priority and not all workflow can be automated and pipelined to fit a cluster. VFX work is not just 3D modelling where you click Render and boom, 2 days later, your scene it's ready to be put on film. There's tons of tasks you need to do pre- and post- production like layout, rigging, motion capture, rotoscoping, comping, etc. and most of these tasks are done manually on the artist's workstation. I'm sure big houses like ILM, Pixar, Weta, Disney have the money and technical chops to engineer and maintain their own in-house rendering cluster infrastructure but small firms don't and rely on beefy workstations like this to render their project over multiple days.
- rainonmoon 6y ago
  I'm not an expert but I do work at a VFX house: GP's assertion about people working in Hollywood rendering on their workstations 24/7 seems unlikely and your data centre vision is more accurate in my experience, where shots are rendered out via dedicated render servers. The ultra-contemporary move is actually to build your pipeline in the cloud.[0] But on-prem, you still need a lot of power in the box when you're working in the scene, and if you just want to bounce out a preview of something small without waiting on the render queue, having that power gives you flexibility. So you're both almost right? EDIT: Oops, leave a tab open for a few hours and come back to find your reply's been scooped. I'll leave this up and add some more links for anyone curious about cloud rendering though[1][2], it's an interesting space. [0] https://press.aboutamazon.com/news-releases/news-release-details/weta-digital-advances-visual-effects-and-animation-cloud-aws https://press.aboutamazon.com/news-releases/news-release-det... [1] https://utopiancorps.com/cloud-rendering/ https://utopiancorps.com/cloud-rendering/ [2] https://www.awsthinkbox.com/studio-in-the-cloud/cloud-rendering https://www.awsthinkbox.com/studio-in-the-cloud/cloud-render...